When we as businesses start or continue the discussion around the value of social media, inevitably the question comes up about sales. Can we sell in social media? Can the value in social media be translated to the cash register or the actual bottom line?
The simple answer is yes.
The more nuanced – and more important – answer is yes…but.
Sales and social media can work together. You can find prospects, talk with prospects, provide information.
The trick is that social media is rarely, if ever, the direct sales channel itself. Social media can increase the likelihood of sales through better targeting, more consistent touchpoints and availability of information, establishing affinities and relationships and all of the things that support the eventual transaction. Those are the same things we would want to do offline to nurture our prospects, but now we have more online channels to bridge those connections in both places.
Yet we’re so impatient to take the platforms social media provides and make them the direct marketing and revenue channel. But it’s not so easy.
Take something like Dell Outlet (disclosure: they’re a customer)? That’s an oft-cited example of empirical proof that social media can be a sales channel since the company reports millions of dollars in sales through that Twitter channel alone. But here’s an important qualification for that.
Dell spent not just months but years building their reputation, addressing customer concerns, offering up feedback channels, listening, participating, and contributing long before they ever made social media channels into a sales vehicle. They invested in their social media presence for a great deal of time – likely without much in the way of easily quantifiable dollar return – and saw the value in all of that first. They not only addressed the concerns and conversations happening within their community, but they spent time shoring up their website and e-commerce experience, providing lots of channels for discussion and feedback, listening and responding, all designed to enhance the journey toward the transaction rather than trying to be the destination.
Dell Outlet works because it’s been and continues to be buttressed by countless people, resources, and information that make it a single trusted channel among an ecosystem of investment in a community. But it’s really unlikely that you can replicate that singular piece with any success until you’re willing to methodically and patiently invest in the rest.
Instead, consider social media as the supporting cast for the sales process, and a way to enhance your prospects’ experience with your company so that the eventual sale feels like a natural, even welcome culmination to the relationship. Here’s a few ideas:
Finding the Point of Need: Listening carefully for when people are asking the right kinds of questions or seeking the sort of information that you can helpfully provide, which turns you into a problem solver instead of a pitch artist. It’s the difference between having your response or comment be an ill-timed interruption or a perfectly timed contribution. Not every mention of your company or competitor is the same as an expressed need, so study the difference and handle with care.
Being Responsive: Few things raise the hackles of people as much as the feeling of being ignored. Be there when someone is asking for you, answer inquiries in a timely fashion (on the web that usually means minutes and hours, not days), and you’ll already be ahead of the game. We don’t ever scold businesses for being too responsive when we’ve asked for their attention, so it’s a worthy goal to aim for. The web moves fast, so we as businesses need to be prepared for new notions of speed.
Availability (and Ease) of Information: Take care to make your website and social destinations user friendly and a fluid experience that reflects the focused needs and attention of social consumers. Have lots of resources front and center, and easy to find, whether it’s on your website or elsewhere. Make them easy to consume, download, and share (from file formats to concise writing and simple visuals). Focus on providing the information that your prospects want and are asking for (even if you didn’t create it!) not just the information you’re wanting them to see.
Being friendly: Amazing as it may seem, politeness, enthusiasm, and manners are not as ubiquitous as we’d like them to be. Teach your front line staff how to be gracious, helpful, and friendly on the web, even in the most trying of circumstances or in the presence of criticism or competition. Help them stay approachable and accessible in the places and ways that your customers are reaching out to you. And if you can’t teach them to do that, it’s time to get different staff to work the front lines of social media. It’s that important.
Focus on the In-Between: As businesses, we’re often myopically focused on the end of the line transaction. The sale. The close. But what we forget too often is that the sale is a momentary, and temporary point in time. It’s an important one, but the sustainability of a sale and a customer is only as good as the experiences between the transactions. Before the sale and after the sale. We spend most of our time as customers in the moments outside of the sale itself, yet we often treat those moments as merely the means to an end through our business lens. Shaping and nurturing the entire customer lifecycle is important, and the interactivity and pervasiveness of social media makes it beautifully suited for the task.
So can sales and social media co exist and even work together? Absolutely. But it requires all of us to remember that a sale is a multi-faceted thing with many variables along the way. And when we start seeing our sales as living, breathing cycles instead of instances that stop and start, we can start understanding and investing in all of the moments and experiences that make a sale a success.
What’s your experience with selling and social media? How are you seeing it done well, and what turns you off? Would you buy from you and why? I’d love to hear more of your take in the comments.